


Sins of the Past

by greygerbil



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Day 4, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-12 23:51:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13558212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: A lazy day off is interrupted when Victor finds an old photo of himself in Yuuri's room.





	Sins of the Past

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Victuuri Week 2018. No prompt, it's Free Day.

Raindrops tapped against the windowpanes and in the common room down the hall, a few hotel guests were talking, their conversations and laughter a distant hum swelling and ebbing in volume like the sound of the waves at Hasetsu beach. Mixed with the simple melodies accompanying Yuuri’s Zelda game, the noises surrounding him were familiar like an old blanket as he stretched out on the sheets in his childhood bedroom.

There were a few new additions to the scene that changed it from those long weekend afternoons of his teenage years. Victor Nikiforov laid with his head on Yuuri’s thighs, his feet dangling off the edge of the bed, his toes gently teasing through his the fur of his dog, who was splayed out on the ground. The narrow bed was a tight fit for two grown men, but Yuuri wished they could stay like this for the rest of the day until they both dozed off. Once more, Yuuri congratulated himself for convincing Victor to take this short holiday at Yuuri’s parent’s place before they moved to St. Petersburg to prepare for the next season. They both needed a break.

Victor had been studying Yuuri’s shelves this morning and picked out a Japanese middle school text book to read, declaring he wanted to learn more kanji. Considering he was only leafing through the book with half-lidded eyes, Yuuri didn’t know whether he was processing anything or just spacing out, but as long as he stayed snug against Yuuri’s legs, he wouldn’t complain, even if his feet were starting to go numb.

“Huh?” Victor made.

Yuuri looked up from the Nintendo DS screen and saw that a thin piece of paper had slipped out of the book Victor was holding. He had picked it up and suddenly seemed much more awake.

“Did you find my old cheat sheets?” Yuuri asked with half a smile.

“No, not exactly.”

Victor turned the paper in his long, slender fingers and Yuuri sat up so abruptly to rip it from his hand that he threw Victor off his legs. Makkachin whined as his master yelped in surprise.

Yuuri had recognised the picture immediately. It was a cut-out from a magazine for teens his sister used to read when Yuuri was young. He’d always stolen the old issues out of the waste-paper basket because there had been one reporter who’d been into sports and sometimes she wrote about the rising star of the figure skating world who had been plastered all over Yuuri’s bedroom walls at the time.

The image showed Victor, not yet twenty, in a candid shot of him at a pool, just lifting himself out of the water. His long, silver hair hung in wet tresses over his shoulders and slender arms, which he used to push himself up. The way that the tiled ground cut off the view of his lower body, paired with what had to be rather low-hanging swimming trunks, made it easy to imagine that he was wearing nothing at all, which Yuuri, at fifteen, had done very often, usually late at night. This secret use was why the image had ended up hidden in an old textbook no one was ever going to touch again – or so he’d thought at the time.

“I already saw the picture,” Victor pointed out as Yuuri, panicking, tried to find somewhere out of Victor’s reach to put it. This cruel reminder of reality made him stop in his tracks, deflating.

“Uhm, this is just, well… I haven’t looked at it in ages!”

He had proof of that, which was that he would have slapped the textbook out of Victor’s hands if he had remembered where he’d put the picture all those years ago. That was not to say that his intimate fantasies of Victor had stopped at fifteen, though, and he really tried not to make Victor aware of that because he couldn’t imagine knowing your boyfriend had jerked off to you in his formative years when you’d never even met yet could be construed as anything but creepy.

“Did you like it when I wore my hair longer?” Victor asked, twirling a short silver strand around his forefinger.

Yuuri pulled himself out of his downwards spiral of panic for a moment as he tried to parse this out-of-left-field comment in the context of the conversation they were having.

“What?” he said, finally giving up.

“In the photo I still have my long hair. Did you like it better when it was that way?”

“I – I don’t really have a preference?” Yuuri stammered. “It looks good long or short.”

“I was thinking of letting it grow out again. You know, for a few years, before it gets too thin, at least,” Victor said, his mouth pulling into a faint pout.

“Your hair isn’t getting thinner,” Yuuri said automatically, tentatively relieved to be in charted territory again. For a moment, he foolishly dared to hope that Victor’s air-headed tendencies had allowed him to oversee the elephant in the room, but then Victor smiled at him and let his hands rest on Makkachin, who had shoved his upper body onto the bed with them.

“I never knew you liked me _so much_ when you were younger.”

“I, well – that’s not… I mean, the reason I got together with you isn’t because…” Was there a polite way of saying ‘because you were my go-to fantasy’? Yuuri couldn’t think of one with Victor’s ice-coloured eyes peering interestedly at him as Yuuri pulled the figurative noose tighter around his own neck. “I admired your work, most of all!”

“I wasn’t a competitive swimmer,” Victor teased.

At a loss for an answer that wasn’t a lie, Yuuri lowered his gaze and wondered if there was any chance that the earth would open up and swallow him whole. However, Victor only laughed and laid back down on him, reaching out to rescue the Nintendo that was teetering on the edge of the bed and pulled it back onto the mattress before he fully settled down with his head on Yuuri’s stomach.

“I guess you always knew what you wanted, didn’t you, Yuuri?” Victor said, snatching the photo from the nightstand where it had ended up. “Did I live up to your expectations?”

“You can’t compare that,” Yuuri answered, his heartbeat slowing down a little. The weight on him was much-needed physical proof that Victor wasn’t going to storm off in justified indignation. “I had never even talked to you. I was just a kid looking at your videos – I thought you were perfect. Now I actually know who you are.”

“It sounds like an insult when you put it like that!” Victor complained, peering up at him.

Gently, Yuuri poked Victor on the head, finger sinking into his silver hair as he managed a smile.

“That’s not what I meant. I like you better now.”

“I hope so! Still, seems you liked this a lot, too.”

With that, Victor pocketed the picture and Yuuri, who wanted to bury the topic as fast as possible, didn’t dare ask why.

-

Yuuri was helping his sister clean out one of the hotel rooms later that afternoon when his phone beeped in his pocket. Opening his messenger, he saw that Victor had sent him a photo.

It was a picture from outside at the onsen, which were nominally forbidden, but Victor had always ignored that rule for his private photo collection. Apparently the rain had stopped, though Yuuri still saw drops cling to the blurry blades of grass in the foreground of the image. The phone had been sat down on the small strip of lawn, probably with a timer on. In focus was Victor, pushing himself out of the hot spring, short, damp strands falling over his face, his hips positioned just high enough to show Yuuri he _definitely_ wasn’t wearing any swimming trunks.

_How do you like this version? It’s not as impressive without the long hair._ Victor had added as a message under the picture.

Frozen, Yuuri stared at the photo until his sister looked up from where she was making the bed and craned her neck to see what he was so fascinated with. Yuuri prayed his screen didn’t get scratched as he shoved his phone down hard, hearing it collide with the keys in his pocket.

“It’s nothing,” he said quickly.

“Uh-huh,” his sister made, but since there were still some pillows to be tended to, Yuuri was let off the hook.

Wiping down the windows suddenly seemed an endless task and as soon as they looked halfway presentable, Yuuri stole out of the room to stare at his phone again. _It’s way better,_ he answered, and it was. The other picture was some shot from a magazine dispersed to tens of thousands of people and Victor probably hadn’t even noticed it had been taken. The second one only belonged to Yuuri and Victor had staged it himself just for him. There couldn’t even be a fair competition between the pictures.

Yuuri decided he had to find Victor now to kiss him or he would probably spend the evening convinced he was living in his own teenage daydream.


End file.
